MAIL!!!!!

Finally!! We have been in China for 76 days and got our first mail today! Apparently our address was faulty so after waiting for a month & a half for the first round of mail from our parents to get here, it ended up back home. The address has been fixed (and posted in the right-hand column) and now we know it actually works! Thank you parents!! This picture is pure sweetness and encouragement to our souls :-) Not that it should affect the voting in any way...

While You Are Voting...

We've uploaded a couple new photo albums for your enjoyment. Don't forget to vote!

Let the Voters Decide!

Since most of you are fresh off voting for president of our fine country, we thought you'd be in good shape for voicing your opinion once again - about our future.

We have compiled a list of pros and cons about our 3 main options come the end of this semester. Consider the information carefully, put yourself in our shoes, then cast your vote. We have no idea what to do right now so your vote may or may not sway us one way or the other.

Option 1: Stay here
- Positives:

• we don't have to deal with the hassle of moving
• we don't lose any money and get a paid trip back home
• no change or transitions to adjust to (we know what we have to deal with)
• we know our way around town and how to get out of town when we need to
• maybe we will learn some sort of lesson?

- Negatives:

• horrible students
• teaching is not possible
• depression
• our current situation is clearly not working out and we don't foresee any major changes
  
• hard on our marriage because we are frustrated about the job
• no friends
• the daily schedule has us teaching classes at 8am and 8pm...never having time to go into town during the week
  
• have to take time off in February to see Liz's parents in Beijing (not sure if they will allow us to do this or if they'll fire us for doing so)

Option 2: Move to Linyi to teach at a University
- Positives:

• personal reference of someone who taught there and loved it
• we'll have a month and a half off between the time we leave here and the time we have to start teaching there with an apartment provided
• we'll teach 15 hours a week
• we'll teach college students who will be able to speak more english and want to learn and be able to make friends with them because they are closer to our age
• our schedule will be 4 hours a day lumped together (more normal M-F)
• our return flight will be covered
• experience a different part of China, a different kind of school (not full of spoiled rich kids who would rather play on a cell phone than learn english)
• be called "professor" (might have to teach them to call me that)

- Negatives:

• having to move all of our stuff there
• slightly lower pay
• a month and a half off with no pay (but...a month & a half off!)
• we have to pay a penalty for breaking our contract here
• new city that we'll have to get to know
• no curriculum at the school so we'll have to start all over with figuring out how to teach college students

Option 3: Go home
- Positives:

• getting to meet our new nieces/nephews when they're born in January and may
• make more money and be able to save some for the future
• make babies
• be home (closer to family, comfort, friends, normal food, etc)
• church
• less stress on our marriage

- Negatives:

• bad economy means it could be hard to get jobs or our old jobs back
• losing money from leaving here
• leaving after only having a bad experience (at least so far)
• missing out on seeing Beijing with Liz's parents

So leave a comment, cast your vote, or send us an email. We'd love your input!

We're Done

Done done done done done.

We sent an email to the school administration informing them that we will not be back to teach 2nd semester and if they would like us to leave now, we will do so immediately.

Today, Liz's out of hand, unteachable class went completely crazy. Over a cell phone. One particularly obnoxious disrespectful student who's cell phone has been taken away several times, the last of which we did not give it back, came up to Liz at the end of class and repeatedly demanded it back. When Liz said no, he began yelling and got in our faces. The rest of the class was getting rowdy so with 2 minutes left of class we decided we had better leave. We gathered our things and began to move towards the door. The student ran to the door and physically blocked it and began yelling hit me and making very aggressive gestures. Now, nothing in the world would have been more satisfying than knocking his brains to the floor, but I grabbed Liz's hand and headed for the other door. He pushed past us and ran to block that one as 3 or 4 of his henchmen stood up to come to his aid. They formed an aggressive, smelly Chinese highschool boy blockade which we outsmarted by turning around and leaving through the front door. As he tried to run past me again to block the door I found it necessary to physically hinder his ability to do so, fearing for my wife's safety. Fortunately (for his sake) he did not throw any punches and we walked around the school past several offices as the entire posse of boys followed wildly. We tried to find someone who spoke English to explain the situation and get them to stop following us and finally we were able to make someone understand that they tried to hit us and were completely out of hand. 

We are now hiding in our apartment and have alerted our fellow English teacher/translator that we will not be teaching our 2 classes tonight. Thankfully the students leave for break tomorrow (which is why he was so mad today), so we will have some relative safety, barring any objects thrown through windows.

We'll keep you updated.

In other news, we're escaping this forsaken place for the relative peace of West Lake in Hangzhou for 2 days. We were going to go somewhere cool that we haven't been to 3 times already, but we need to save our money in case we need to make some emergency travel plans...............sigh.

National Peasant Games!

I'm sure you'll be as overjoyed as I was to hear that China has something called the National Peasant Games! Apparently this has taken place every 4 years since 1988 and includes such events as "60-meter rice-transplanting race", "60-meter snatch the grain and get it into storage" and "water carrying contest to protect the seedlings amid drought."

Read more about this fantastic sporting event here.

Life Feels Hard

As you may have guessed by our lack of humor, or writing, for that matter over these past few weeks, Joel and I are barely making it through each day (Joel is making it, I am barely making it). Obviously we are sheltered, clothed, fed (with Oreos), and are for the most part healthy, but our emotional state is somewhat lacking in its essential elements of survival. We have been pushed to find parts of our personalities we didn't even know existed. I've seen Joel actually angry...and that is a rare, rare occasion. I think maybe the only other time I have seen him mad was when I yelled at him for not killing a spider fast enough when we first got married.

These kids are hard. And annoying. And lazy. And disrespectful. And the list goes on... I have worked with sex offenders... 11-18 year old boys who are most likely in jail since the last time I saw them. They swore at me, they physically tried to hurt me, they threatened to kill me, and said various other things that only Joel and my former co-workers will hear me say. Somehow, these kids are worse. How is that? How can I handle all boys...all teenage boys...who have severly damaged other people's lives, but I can't handle these kids? How is it that I actually enjoyed and miss working with those boys, but can't wait to get out of this place? I really have no idea, these are just my thoughts. I think it may be that I can't control these kids. They don't respect me or enjoy me. At least the sex offenders, in their calm and competent states, enjoyed me. They made me laugh and they laughed at me. They were generally fun to be around and would listen to me, even help me, if one of the boys went crazy. We are absolutely alone in our struggle to teach these kids. Granted, teaching kids English is not as serious of a task as keeping kids from killing each other, and failure to make it doesn't heed very drastic results on anyone but us, but still.

Yesterday was the last straw for Joel in his worst class. After kicking 7-8 kids out of class he then proceeded to talk to the guy who is supposed to be our English help about the class. He communicated things we've been saying over and over again about the lack of discipline in the school and the lack of more then 3 students per class that pay attention in our classes. This "conversation" and an eventual trip to see who we think is the headmaster of the school ended up leading to 3 apology letters from the students in his bad class. The letters were their discipline...and the letters we're written for them by the 1 girl in the class who knows any English. This complete lack of any sort of justice just kills me. For those of you who know me well, you know I can't handle things that are unfair (I am not saying its a good quality). I just get a little firey and this fruitless action made me irritated. I want justice, revenge, retribution. Some form of punishment would be nice. Yes, this sounds terrible, but its true.

Well anyway, enough ranting. I started this post yesterday and now I am trying to finish it while being home with a migraine. I can't really get angry or I'll just make my head hurt worse :)

Other random updates:
1. This morning I felt sick and needed to...well, go to the bathroom...quickly,but Joel was showering. If you've seen pictures of our bathroom you would know it is impossible to do both at the same time unless I wanted to get soaking wet. So, I went to the bathroom this morning while holding an umbrella.

2. Joel taught one of my classes this morning and had all of them write me get well cards. We will post the most hilarious ones later, but the main idea was that I should eat apples to give me power and wear more clothes because it is getting colder and colder in Anji (the highs are in the 60s).

3. We're playing a significant amount of ping pong lately.

4. We've started watching Grey's Anatomy online and I am (we are) addicted. I am a little too emotionally attached and end up crying anytime someone in the show dies, which happens nearly every episode. We watch at least 2 episodes a day.

5. We miss home and the fall and pumpkin lattes. The closest Starbucks (2 hours away) told me they might have pumpkin lattes at Christmas. Christmas?!

6. We tried to bake our first item in the rice cooker this week. Coffee cake! It turned out okay, but mostly just burned all around the outside so badly that a few pieces tasted like smoke. Next time we'll try to bake on the "keep warm" setting rather than shove a fork into the lever to keep it on the "cook rice" setting. We'll let you know how it goes.

Finally...

Here's the video from Shanghai. There's about 25 minutes worth so it's broken in 3 parts to get it on YouTube. 

Sorry we've been silent lately, just same old struggling with these darned kids. We just picked up some teachers books so the stress of using the internet to find resources should be done. That'll help a ton with lesson planning...hopefully. The challenge of getting our students to participate still remains. We've realized that from the top on down, this is a pretty terrible school. Granted, there are enough good students that if you combined them, they could make 2 or 3 good classes, but the majority of the students just plain have no respect at all for us. And don't try to tell me it's cause we lost it. They couldn't even bother themselves to pay attention the very first day way back on September 1. 

Anyway, here are those videos :-)

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3

Water Fixed!

Miraculously, they already came and already fixed the pipe! We didn't get a shower this morning, but we both happened to shower last night anyway, so we weren't too gross. We should also be getting a new mattress soon! No more chasm-filled mattress! Or so we hope. Who knows what our replacement might be.

I am also officially part of the basketball team and they are apparently going to buy me a uniform and even shoes. I hope I get to keep them. Teaching isn't any easier, but at least a little bit of faith in this school has been restored...

Water Broke

The pipe to our toilet broke tonight...and our one English speaking contact has his cell phone off. We had to shut all our water off to make the water stop flowing out of the broken pipe so we are currently without a working toilet, shower, or sink. For our sake and every last one of our students, let's hope this gets fixed tomorrow and not next week.

By the way, all the pictures are posted at http://picasaweb.google.com/joel.ahlquist1
.

Sharing Shanghai...

With a billion other people. National Day in Shanghai is worse than Mall of America on Black Friday! No time for a real post right now, but here's some of our pictures. Internet in our hostel is pretty slow so they probably won't all get uploaded till we get back to Anji.